Reform UK is coming for your job
the war on pylons is a war on your pay packet, your training, your place in the next economy.
On 3 May 2025, Richard Tice MP took to social media with a threat.
Not to oil companies. Not to private landlords or water polluters.
But to anyone thinking of investing in clean energy in Lincolnshire.
“If you are thinking of investing in solar farms, battery storage systems, or trying to build pylons – think again. We will fight you every step of the way. We will win.”
Reform UK now controls the Lincolnshire mayoralty, the county council, and a parliamentary seat. With that tweet, Tice made clear that their project is not one of renewal or opportunity, but obstruction. It is a declaration of war on the green transition, launched from the heart of one of Britain’s most economically vulnerable regions.
If allowed to take hold, it won’t just stall climate progress. It will steal tens of thousands of future jobs from the very people who need them most.
Because green jobs aren’t theoretical. They are shovel-ready, technically skilled, and nationally urgent. And right now, they are being sabotaged by a movement that claims to speak for the working class while pulling up the ladder of economic opportunity from under them.
What Green Jobs Actually Look Like
Across the UK, the transition to a low-carbon economy is already generating work. The offshore wind industry alone supports over 32,000 jobs, a number projected to grow to 97,000 by 2030 with the right investment. The heat pump sector is expected to create 50,000 installation and maintenance roles over the next five years. Retrofitting homes for energy efficiency could employ more than 200,000 people, while electric vehicle battery gigafactories, like the one being developed in Somerset, promise another 4,000 direct manufacturing roles.
These are not abstract numbers. They are entry points into stable, skilled work for electricians, mechanics, logistics workers, project managers, welders, and thousands of school leavers now coming of age in places like Lincolnshire, Teesside, and South Yorkshire. These jobs offer not only decent wages but the chance to build careers with purpose and longevity.
The demand is real. The infrastructure is possible. What’s missing is the political will to connect those young people with training, transport, and time to learn.
Instead, they are watching elected leaders actively campaign against the very investments that could secure their future.
Who Reform Is Really Fighting
When Richard Tice says, “we will fight you every step of the way,” it’s worth asking: who is “you”?
He’s not fighting faceless corporations. He’s fighting the 18-year-old apprentice in Gainsborough who hoped to join a wind turbine maintenance team. He’s fighting the mother of two in Skegness who retrained as a retrofit assessor and now risks losing contracts due to stalled investment. He’s fighting the college in Boston that was ready to launch a battery systems diploma, only to see local political pressure scare off funding partners.
He is fighting the 120,000 workers currently employed in energy efficiency and low-carbon heating across the UK. He is fighting the logistics drivers in Spalding whose sector could be strengthened by battery storage jobs. He is fighting the secondary school student in Grimsby who wanted a job and a future that wouldn’t involve a zero-hours contract or minimum wage.
When the Reform Party blocks pylons, they are not standing up for rural communities. They are cutting off the cables that could bring affordable, clean electricity to homes, schools, and hospitals. When they threaten solar farms, they are threatening domestic energy security and the farmworkers who could maintain the panels. When they oppose battery systems, they are opposing the very technologies that would allow Lincolnshire to store power locally, reduce bills, and create skilled employment.
This is not protectionism. It is economic vandalism dressed up as common sense.
The Price of Sabotage
Lincolnshire is already among the ten poorest counties in England by average earnings. It has some of the lowest levels of adult skills, some of the highest levels of economic inactivity among men under 40, and towns where over 30 percent of children grow up in poverty. These are not inevitable statistics. They are the result of decades of underinvestment and political abandonment.
The green transition could offer a way out of that pattern. Not through handouts, but through high-quality, regionally rooted jobs. It could offer young people a reason to stay. It could stabilise families, reinvigorate the tax base, and give local authorities the confidence to invest in long-term planning.
Instead, Lincolnshire has become a test case for whether grievance politics can kill the future before it arrives.
And if this playbook succeeds here, it will not stop here.
What begins in Lincolnshire will spread to the Humber, to Norfolk, to the Fens and the Black Country. The economic destruction wrought by Reform in these left behind areas will not stop in Grimsby.
What Needs to Be Fought For
We need to be clear-eyed. Green jobs won’t arrive on their own. They require public investment, deliberate planning, community involvement, and reliable pathways into employment. But most of all, they require that we do not let bad-faith actors shut the door before it even opens.
What Reform is trying to do in Lincolnshire is not ideological. It is strategic. It is a gamble that local people are too tired, too cynical, or too abandoned to hope for something better.
But that gamble can be lost.
If we fight not just for climate targets, but for concrete employment strategies tied to people’s existing skills. If we embed training within communities and pay people to learn. If we push for public ownership, so that the profits from wind, solar, and heat flow back into local schools and health services. And if we expose the real consequences of these culture war tactics: fewer jobs, less investment, higher bills, and narrower futures.
I worry, genuinely, that for Lincolnshire it may be too late. That this battlecry, one I have never seen before - a sitting MP declaring war on people who might want to invest in his constituency - will make Lincolnshire a less attractive place for that kind of investment. There are other neighbouring areas, also suitable, where that investment might now go. But these ‘left behind’ regions, and the young people within them who Reform are set to abandon and sabotage at every turn, are worth fighting for.
The Real Victory
Richard Tice says “we will win.” And in the short term, he might. He has the votes. He has the headlines. He has the momentum.
But victory isn’t measured in retweets.
Victory is measured in whether a young person in Lincolnshire has a job at 24, a flat by 26, and a future that doesn’t begin with the words “you’ll have to move.”
Victory is measured in whether we build an economy where a low-carbon future doesn’t come at the expense of those who’ve already been left behind.
We know what is possible. We just have to decide whether we’re willing to fight for it.
We have five years to decide whether this country builds the next economy or tears it down out of spite. If you believe in work, in wages, in a future worth staying for, get organised. Start local. And don’t let the wreckers win.
If we want decent jobs, clean power, and working-class prosperity, we’re going to have to fight for them, against the forces trying to make collapse look like common sense.